This is my problem with the alternatives, nothing has replicated simple voice channels (next to text ones) that you can see who's in and just jump in and out of, with screen share. This shouldn't be any harder to implement than video calling itself but almost nothing has done it. Even spacebar chat is more interested in keeping discord bots compatible than achieving feature parity.
Why is it a major feature omission? Screen sharing isn't an easily solvable problem, there aren't any good FOSS libraries out there (at least that I'm aware of).
Expecting a way way way smaller team that didn't get $1billion in founding, like Discord did, is an extremely poor mindset to have.
All you're proving is the need to implement a tech tax to force companies to fund FOSS at the behest of the federal government, which frankly I'm all for.
It's a major omission because the voice and video integration is one of Discord's killer features. Sorry that it's hard, but something that doesn't integrate those seamlessly isn't a discord alternative
Okay, I'm sure if they got $1billion in funding they could implement the same feature but expecting a way smaller team with way less resources to have parity with such a company is just unrealistic.
Zulip is a website packaged into an electron app. It does not take $1billion to implement webrtc into a website as screensharing + video / audio calls are a solved problem on the web (Zulip is a web app).
Where did you get the idea that it takes a ton of money to do it?
* Centralized identity, and participating in multiple communities at once: People sign up once, then navigate to whatever autonomous communities they choose quickly.
* No hosting requirement (good for ease of use): Want a new autonomous space? Create it! Boom! No installation, no hosting, no monetary cost.
* Video streaming: No other chat client does this easily. Not Mumble, Ventrilo, Teamspeak, or these chat programs.
If you want to defeat Discord, particularly in the gaming server arena, you need to make interacting with multiple servers better and you need screen/video streaming.
Discord's main competitive advantage was getting a cool $1billion in founding and being able to support a massive team without the need to worry about profit for the entirety of its existence.
Nobody gives a shit about that man. I don't care if it's unfair. I care that this app does the things I want. How it came to be is entirely irrelevant to me.
